Vertor offers index of verified torrents

A new service called Vertor launched recently with a goal to make the BitTorrent protocol even more popular, easy-to-use and reliable. It uses an automatic system to download content from various BitTorrent sources and verify that the contents are real and safe. The downloads are snagged by an array of 5 servers, running on dual-core technology with 8GB of RAM each currently.

Vertor has a number of ways to avoid adding a bad torrent to its database...

When a torrent file is retrieved it is queued on the servers for download. If the download does not start after a number of attempts, a "download error" status is tagged and the torrent file is not added to the database.

If the download turns out to be an archive (or set of common archives), the system will decompress the data and create a file list. If this fails, the content is marked as "protected" and is not added to the database.

If the download includes video content, the system will automatically take screenshots from the files. If the screenshots are blank, then the downloads are marked as DRM protected and not added.

If the download contains audio content, small chunks of the data is cut for verification purposes.

If a text file is determined to contain a description of the contents, it is saved and is downloadable for users on the site.

The Vertor system can also determine if the downloaded content contains viruses or other malicious files. It is certainly a clever concept and it will be interesting to see how it evolves as a service.

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